The Jefferson Agrarian

The New York Times reported that California artist Larry Sultan has died of cancer in Greenbrae, CA, at age 63.

Many of us were fascinated in the 1970s by Sultan’s collaborative work with Santa Cruz photographer Mike Mandel, EVIDENCE. Evidence was a book of vernacular photographs taken from public and private corporate and government files (remember, this was well before the internet) and interwoven in a visual language, sans any explanation. EVIDENCE was a presage of the post-modernist movement afoot in the seventies – the seemingly random photographs were somehow morphed into art that had a profound effect on many of us art students in San Francisco during that time. They were quite removed from the cloying modernist works we were being subjected to (and generating) at art school then.

Somehow, as detached evidences, they seemed, well, more truthful.

Sultan was a photographic artist whose work has exhibited internationally. His pictures are included in collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Tate Modern. Sultan has received numerous grants and awards, including five NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, and a Fleishhacker Fellowship.

Sultan ‘s recent series, “The Valley,” is a photographic exploration of the San Fernando Valley, where he had grown up. Sultan wrote in the LAWeekly in 2004: “The furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door, the shoes under the bed are transformed into props or the residue of unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the piece of half-eaten pie on the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”

While the subject matter was seemingly benign – suburban interiors used as sets for pornographic films – it was obvious that Sultan was still collecting Evidence, right up to the end.